Surgeons use a variety of suture anchors to conduct soft tissue repair procedures. For these procedures, one or more sutures, called “repair sutures” are attached to a suture anchor, which is or will be fixed to bone. The repair sutures are then used to tie soft tissue down to the bone. There are challenges that arise with prior approaches to joining a repair suture to a suture anchor.
FIG. 1 shows a prior suture-anchor joining approach in which a suture, e.g., repair suture 10, runs externally through a suture channel 12 in the surface of an anchor body and passes through a transverse bore, e.g., eyelet 14. This approach reduces the contact area of anchor ribs against a hole drilled into bone (bone hole or pilot hole), and thus lowers fixation strength. In addition, there is some amount of compression by the surrounding bone on the suture, and into the anchor. This can result in suture damage and difficulty in sliding the repair suture. Suture slide is a function desired when tying knots.